Was the iPad 3 Apple's "Plan B"?

Apple's iPad 3 may be a bit fatter than its predecessor (almost sacrilege in gadget design terms) but it's got a far better screen, which is one of the primary selling points. Yet, it may surprise you to learn that the iPad 3's screen could have been thinner - or at least, that was apparently the original plan.

President of DisplayMate Technologies, Raymond Soneira, has told CNET that - in the same way many view the iPhone 4S as a backup option to the originally hoped-for iPhone 5 - the iPad 3 was actually the inferior product too.

Ray says: "There's no question that the iPad 3 is Plan B. The plan was to use this new technology called IGZO from Sharp — a lot higher electron mobility that allows them to make the transistors a lot smaller and the circuit elements a lot smaller. There’s no question that the iPad 3 is Plan B.

"They pushed amorphous silicon to a higher [pixels per inch] than anybody else. But the light throughput is not good. So it has roughly twice as many LEDs, and they had to get a 70 percent larger battery.”

If we're to put that into plain olde English for you, that is: Apple wanted to use Sharp's IGZO technology which would have been thinner but instead went with a different option that needed a bigger, heavier battery. Boooo.

As with all of these situations, we don't actually know if it's true - and Apple are hardly going to break the famous tight-lip policy to admit one of their flagship products actually could have been better, are they?

TBH I would think/hope Apple and other companies of a similar size do this as standard. Have several prototypes being developed each with different numbers of new technology being crammed into it, and at a set time point the decision is made which prototype to go with.

The cynic in me however does think at apple the decision of which prototype they will go with is influenced more by "what are the others doing and what is the minimum we can do to update?" rather than " what is the best tech we can cram into the iPad in the timetable we have?". Almost total dominace of the tablet marketplace is not the best arena for revolutionary updates